On Wed, Mar 24, 2004 at 01:59:45PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Under what circumstances does CO2 become a liquid? I was under the impression that, > on earth, at least, it turns straight from a solid into a gas. It seems to me that > its existance as a liquid would be highly unstable, at best, and that the likelihood > that a standing body of liquid CO2 could exist long enough to create layered bedrock > is virtually nil.
Accurate: http://www.chem.uncc.edu/faculty/murphy/1252/Chapter11B/sld004.htm Triple point is -56.4 deg C/5.11 atm, which doesn't look like an early, wet Mars. Plus, supercritical CO2 is a good solvent, but not for ionics. > > It seems to me as if the Mars rover team has been enormously conservative in its > pronouncements, and that they would not have announced evidence for a significant > standing body of water unless the evidence was pretty much indisputable. I know > Europa is our first love on this list, but it's beginning to look as if Mars is a > pretty interesting place as well. Given that shortest impact ejecta transfer time is half a year, and rock interior never goes over 40 deg C during the transfer you can damn well assume that most of the solar system must be riddled with life, of a common origin, probably local. Maybe not complex enough to fossilize well, but I'll be very unsurprised if this or subsequent rover missions finds a fossil, or two. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net
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